


Mapping The World

by inlovewithnight



Category: Hornblower (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-26
Updated: 2006-03-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:37:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Mapping The World

He held those books and pages more dear to his heart than any living thing, or so said those who knew him. Horatio Hornblower would much prefer a day alone with his maps than an hour in the presence of a king. So they said, and perhaps they were not so very far off at that. There was an order to his charts, a definition in the black ink on pale paper, that he had found greatly lacking in all persons of his acquaintance, including kings.

Men were not maps, and could not be expected to be; they were not hemmed in by an orderly grid, line by line to give you your bearings, wherever you might go. If he wished to chart all of those he had known in his life, all of those he had viewed with greater or lesser degrees of indifference (in his heart of hearts he hesitated to say that he had ever hated or loved), well, wishing did little good so far as he had ever seen. Wishing for a wind had never filled a set of sails. Only time and chance did that.

The possibility intrigued him, though, that one might map a life as any other stretch of territory traversed with an observant eye. Not an ordinary life, perhaps; not a life as others seemed to lead, noisy and bright and swirling with tempests of passion. But a life such as his, held close within borders, lived strictly and in ordered lines: might that not be marked out on paper, drawn as a model, noted about the edges with warnings to heed? _Here be monsters_ , ancient cartographers had cried in the margins of their work. _Travellers beware!_

It was too great a temptation to resist, to indulge himself in a rare moment of foolishness. So simple to draw a sheet of paper from his desk, to dip his pen, to begin the orderly listing of the dates, names, places that made up the substance of a life. It was work of perhaps ten minutes, to place his own mortal span to date in text before him. A moment's hesitation, a consideration of the words, a nod: so it was. His life, then. It consumed not quite a single page.

Turn next to the question of latitude, Hornblower. There must be a line of zero, an Equator, about which all else could be measured. The placement as such was crucial: it must fall at the center of his life.

Logic dictated but a single possibility, then. His Equator must be his entrance into the Navy; it could not be otherwise. He hesitated before drawing the line--such a frightful blankness above that point, as if half of his life (save birth, mother's death, commencement and termination of education) had scarcely happened at all. He had long flattered himself, though, that if nothing else he could see a fact when it was as plain as the nose on his face, and therefore he marked the line in at the appropriate date. He was pleased to see that the pen-stroke did not waver.

Very well, then. Subsequent lines of latitude were easier, in relation: commission, promotion, advancement, this honor or that; marriage, fatherhood, bereavement. Five degrees or ten off from each other, dividing the column of dates precisely, laid down with black ink and quill pen and straight-edge.

He supposed, with an unease and hesitancy that grew the longer he considered this project of absurdity he had set for himself, that the matter of longitude ought to be settled based on those individuals off of whom he had guided and patterned his life. A brief indecision over whether propriety dictated King or Christ at the center, before the muttered supposition that of course one must err on the side of divinity, who thus took pride of place as Prime Meridian.

Only a small handful of other names, few enough that they must be marked out at twenty-degree intervals. Well enough. From boyhood he had not craved excessive human contact, having learned the sting of such a longing left unsatisfied. Twenty-degree intervals were as much as any man had a right to hope for; any more would crowd the page terribly, after all.

And so the framework of a human life was laid down with ink on paper, and after another moment's consideration he judged it an accurate one. What else could be said to compose a man, but those he honored and admired, and the sequence of events that made up his years? His feelings about the events, perhaps. His reactions and rememberances. And thus he turned his attention and his pen to topography.

And found it quite impossible. To plot the coastline of an acquaintance or a period of service (his somewhat-apprenticeship under Pellew, the stretch of time that he had known Maria Mason), that was well and good, and within his capabilities. But the finer points of it (the trivia and minutiae of a life, the fine work of mountains and inlets and streams) caused his fingers to tremble the barest amount, and a fine spray of ink fell across the page.

 _Matters of no consequence,_ he insisted to himself. A longing never pursued, an injustice left uncorrected, questions never asked or never _quite_ answered, heartaches and the rare odd moments of blinding joy: what did those _mean_ , in the context of a life? Nothing. Less than nothing. Best forgotten, certainly not worth troubling himself.

He had never had the knack of forgetting, and had abandoned long ago the hope of passing an untroubled night.

He stared at the page for another moment (cold grid of lines and numbers, outlines of circumstances left naked and bare) and swept it off the desk, upsetting the inkwell and hardly noticing.

He snatched the offending paper from the floor and threw it into the fire, watching it slowly curl in towards its own center (zero and zero, God save His Majesty's Navy) as it was consumed. He sat there for some time longer, slowly rubbing his fingertips together until the ink settled deeply into his skin, and contemplated the ashes.  



End file.
